The band’s increasingly high-profile shows earned them a devoted fan base and serious industry attention they signed with Columbia Records and released their major-label debut in 1967. Her adoption of a wild sartorial style – with granny glasses, frizzed-out hair and extravagant attire that winked, hippie-style, at the burlesque era – further spiked her burgeoning reputation. But California drew her back into its glittering embrace in 1966, when she joined the Haight-based psychedelic-rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company. She returned to Texas to escape the excesses of the Haight, enrolling as a sociology student at Lamar University, adopting a beehive hairdo and living a generally “straight” life despite occasional forays to perform in Austin. These tracks – including blues standards like “Trouble in Mind” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” – would later surface as the infamous “Typewriter Tapes” bootleg. She met up with guitarist Jorma Kaukonen (later of the legendary San Francisco rock outfit Jefferson Airplane) and the pair recorded a suite of songs with his wife, Margareta, providing the beat on her typewriter.

She briefly attended college in Beaumont and Austin but was more drawn to blues legends and beat poetry than her studies soon she dropped out and, in 1963, headed for San Francisco, eventually finding herself in the notoriously drug-fueled Haight Ashbury neighborhood. A self-described “misfit” in high school, she suffered virtual ostracism, but dabbled in folk music with her friends and painted. Her volcanic performances left audiences stunned and speechless, while her sexual magnetism, world-wise demeanor and flamboyant style shattered every stereotype about female artists – and essentially invented the “rock mama” paradigm.īorn in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1943, Joplin fell under the sway of Leadbelly, Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton in her teens, and the authenticity of these voices strongly influenced her decision to become a singer. She claimed the blues, soul, gospel, country and rock with unquestionable authority and verve, fearlessly inhabiting psychedelic guitar jams, back-porch roots and everything in between. But Janis Joplin didn’t merely possess a great instrument she threw herself into every syllable, testifying from the very core of her being. That voice – high, husky, earthy, explosive – remains among the most distinctive and galvanizing in pop history.

Janis joplin piece of my heart history